Creating a basic marketing strategy for your small business is a great way to kick-start your marketing efforts. If you are looking to improve your marketing this year, here are some key ideas that you will want to include in your strategy:
Define Your Goals
This is going to be one of the most important parts of creating a basic marketing strategy… what are the main goals for your marketing efforts?
– Are you wanting to increase brand awareness?
– Is the goal to drive traffic to your website?
– Do you want to generate leads?
– Are you wanting to boost sales?
Setting some clear and specific goals, will guide your marketing strategy.
Know Your Target Audience
To be able to effectively market to your target audience, you will need to know some basic information about them. Once you know this information and understand their demographics, interests, and their pain points, you will be able to write and create your content to speak directly to them.
If you haven’t spent the time to sit down and discover your target audience, perhaps now is the time to make this a priority? I have a lesson in my Little Biz Growth Academy membership, or a whole workshop in my Little Biz Foundations course that will help you discover your target market and create an avatar for them.
Content Strategy
Once you have set your goals and know your target market, you can then create some content to help you achieve these goals. I highly recommend leveraging your website and blog to create valuable and engaging content for your audience. Creating a content calendar outlining your topics, post types, and a publishing schedule will help you to create the content and post it consistently.
Social Media Strategy
Taking the content calendar and topics that you created in the previous step, you can then repurpose that content into bite-sized pieces that you can share across your social media accounts. From one blog post, you can create several social media content pieces, and even record a couple of videos about this content piece, to engage your audience.
It is always a good idea to direct them back to your website to read the blog in full. Your social media content should be enough to pique their interest to click the link. Developing a social media calendar along with the content calendar mentioned above will also help you to be consistent with your marketing strategy goals.
I would recommend that you tailor the content to the specific platform you are posting on. Uploading directly to your social media platforms can be time consuming. But this is where tools like Sociamonials can come in handy, allowing you to reach and engage with your audience easily!
Sociamonials is a one-time purchase and will allow you to schedule and post content to the following platforms:
– Facebook
– Instagram
– LinkedIn
– Google Business Profile
– Pinterest
– YouTube
– Twitter (X), and
– TikTok
Don’t forget to create create visually appealing posts, interact with your followers, and use relevant hashtags to increase visibility.
Email Marketing
One of the strengths of a business, is the size of their email lists. If you lost your social media accounts tomorrow, do you have another way to contact your customers?
Part of creating a basic marketing strategy should include implementing an email marketing strategy. This helps you to nurture your leads and stay connected with customers by sending out newsletters, promotions, updates, and personalized content to keep your audience engaged.
SEO Optimisation
SEO should always form part of your marketing strategy if you have a website. At it’s most basic form, keyword research is one of the most important parts of search engine optimisation. When you write your content, you will want to target some long-tail keywords that are relevant to your industry, services and what your customers are looking for.
By optimising your website content, you are able to help improve your visibility in search engines. This will in turn will help to drive organic traffic to your website. When we are talking about SEO for your website, these are the most common factors;
– focus on keyword research
– ensuring you have your meta tags set
– you are posting quality content
– adding some new backlinks to your website, and
– also looking at improving user experience on your website (including making sure your website is responsive for mobile devices).
If you need some assistance with your on-site SEO, I would love to have a chat with you. Contact Us today.
Paid Advertising
Part of your basic marketing strategy may include some paid advertising options such as Google Ads or social media ads. This helps you to reach a wider audience and drive targeted traffic to your website or landing pages.
Before you engage in paid advertising, ensure that you have clear goals for what you are wanting, and make sure you have the landing pages set up correctly before paying to send traffic there.
Analytics & Tracking
Of course, you will want to test and measure your marketing strategy. Use tools like Google Analytics to track key metrics such as website traffic, engagement rates, conversion rates, and ROI. Meta have their own analytics to help you track key metrics such as engagement, shares and watches.
When you are reviewing your marketing strategy, make sure you use this data available so you can make informed decisions going forward, and optimize your marketing strategy.
Don’t be afraid to tweak any marketing efforts that aren’t working, or drop ineffective marketing strategies if they aren’t working for you.
So, there it is, my ideas on the things you need to consider for creating a basic marketing strategy. Depending on where you are in your business journey will depend on how many of these ideas you incorporate into your marketing strategy. Don’t forget to keep your marketing goals front and centre when creating a plan. Remember to adapt and adjust your strategy based on your results and feedback.
If you are looking for someone to partner with to help you create a basic marketing strategy, or help you to implement some of the ideas in your strategy, feel free to reach out to us via our contact page to see if we are a good fit.
